Monday, April 30, 2012

As I've stated, my motivation for
writing a trilogy in which the main character is gay was two-fold: A)
I was writing A Book of Tongues “for me”, and as a
slasher, that's my bag, baby, but B) around the same time I began, I
also ran across some of Hal Duncan (Vellum, Ink)'s writing
about QUILTBAG representation in popular media, and though “yes, I
can do that—complicated, tough gay dudes whose tragedy doesn't
necessarily come attached to their sexuality ahoy!” By the end of A
Book, however, I was happy to see that the spectrum of
non-default character sexuality already seemed to be expanding far
beyond the “hard gay” axis, embracing functional bisexuality and
straight-with-an-exceptionality alike. This has continued to happen
throughout the rest of the series, with A Rope of Thorns
adding polysexual relationships and lesbianism with a hint of
transgender issues, depending on how Yiska actually sees herself
(more on that later); in A Tree of Bones, those existing
currents are continued, hopefully remaining emotionally front and
centre as the characters those sexualities come attached to stay in
play. And while I'm sad to say I wan't quite able to push it far
enough to include any overtly asexual characters, who knows? I
already know this universe ain't completely done with me.

What's become particularly interesting
for me, however, is that while my original impulse contained a
healthy dose of prurience, the actual ratio of sex-to-action has gone
down in each instalment, partly due to lack of time vs. intensity of
immediate physical threat. This hopefully reduces the fetishistic
angle somewhat, which I'm happy with, but it also goes back to
Duncan's observation that while sexuality is obviously a cornerstone
of most people's motivations, it's not the be-all and end-all we
privilege it as in most narratives. And since queerness is a concept
which has its roots in a reclaimed slur, a way of self-definition
which says: “Yes, I am 'different', but there's nothing wrong with
that”, how much further do you have to push before you can note
that that sounds as much like hexes defining themselves “against”
non-hexes and vice versa as it does like it necessarily has anything
to do with who does or doesn't sleep with whom? So the spectrum
widens further, hopefully, the default shifting, until you end up in
(to my mind) an interesting world where maybe even the non-default
characters can feel pretty “queer” themselves, in certain
contexts.

(Apologies, of course, for any
interesectional toes I may have stepped on with this line of
rumination—as a straight person with a particular kink, it's never
my intention to co-opt anyone's identity, except in fiction.)

R is for—Red Weed

By A Tree, the Red Weed—Datura
nazacul, as Doc Asbury calls it, that parasite infestation of
Hell Kudzu spawned by Chess Pargeter's Xipe Totec incarnation
throughout A Rope of Thorns—has become a bit of a
non-speaking supporting character in some ways, a plot device in
others. Some people have rightly noted that it's reminiscent of the
trickster predator vines in Scott Smith's The Ruins, which
I'll totally cop to; frankly, I don't see how the two couldn't have
had some sort of relationship, considering said ruins are those of a
Mayan temple. I'd say the main difference in presentation with the
Weed this time 'round is that in Rope, Chess didn't know how
to control it, and didn't want to know—but here it's being wielded
by the Enemy, who understands innately how best to let it do his
bidding. Also, given that I'm not a big fan of the re-set mode in
storytelling, the Weed is probably here to stay, even by this part of
the saga's end...a severe ecological shift, a sort of lasting
hex-pollution. Which will have interesing implications for my version
of the Weird West in future, no doubt.

There's a reason I keep on calling the
Hexslinger series my “blood-soaked black magic gay porno horse
opera” (or various recombinations thereof), aside from the fact
that it obviously amuses the crap out of me. And essentially, that
reason goes right back to my formative years, when I would tell
people I liked horror and people would wrinkle their noses and ask:
“Uh...why?” The implication always being that horror is (to any
reasoning human being) a disgusting, exploitative genre which aims to
make entertainment out of our most intimate and dreadful fears—it's
sexist by nature because of fetishizing female victimhood, often -ist
of multiple other stripes through exoticization-of-evil tropes,
heterosexist and heteronormative, nihilistically bleak, etc. Also
just plain gross, with all those bodily fluids. What kind of a person
are you, tiny Gemma?

Answer: I'm the kind of person who
likes opera, lit and fig. I don't see these things as icky or
wrenching. They uplift me in a literally awful way. I don't know why,
but each succeeding clusterfuck is like yet another aria, black and
red and purple all over. It's glorious. Expect more of the same.

P is for—Pinkerton

Oh Allan Pinkerton, you probably
weren't a good guy, exactly, but you sure weren't as bad as
I've spent three books making you out to be. That being said, I think
the way Pinkerton's degenerated by the beginning of A Tree of
Bones is set in stark, fairly intentional parallel with Ixchel's
degeneration on the other side of the War on Hex: He's the same sort
of villain, the same sort of monster, the same sort of addict, but he
thinks he's different, because he's using science rather than
superstition to tap into that massive field of what one can only
assume is a natural force, hexation. But just like her, he's
sacrificing other people right and left to his “cause”; just like
her, what he really wants at base is to usher in a bold new era of
parasitism and slavery. And half my people have to work with/for him!

Then again, lurking in the background,
we do have those two agents who've broken from the fold and are now
working against Pinkerton, Frank Geyer (first introduced in A Rope
of Thorns) and George Thiel, who we've heard of but not from,
thus far. Like Pinkerton, both are actual historical characters who I
seized on and bent to my own ends; Thiel, for example, is mainly
known as the guy who split off to form his own detective agency, but
didn't manage to eclipse Pinkerton's original brand. The great
part about alternate universes, however, is that things can end up
very differently—and to me, in both cases, the true legacy of Allan
Pinkerton is the “detective agency” concept he pioneered, an
unacknowledged branch of the government with ties to the Secret
Service who functioned as a sort of proto-Federal Bureau of
Investigation. A very useful thing to have control of, in any
universe that contains hexation.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Though not exactly otherwise
describable in any way, shape or form as a typical Mama's boy, our
frilly Mister Pargeter is nevertheless doomed from his first
appearance in A Book of Tongues—when a drunken San Francisco
idjit tries valiantly to insult him by explicitly comparing him to
his drug-addicted (literal) whore of a mother, “English” Oona—to
always be thinking about the ways in which they're either similar or
different. Doesn't help that they're both small, red-headed, vicious
and apt to trade sex for favours, of course...but from the very
minute I decided to have Chess let his boyfriend dispose of Oona
long-distance, I knew that the worst place he could ever end up after
that would be getting stuck in some version of Hell with only his
dead Ma for company. Not exactly coincidentally (and not a spoiler,
per se), it is this exact situation Chess finds himself in at the end
of A Rope of Thorns/beginning of A Tree of Bones. Cue
bonding! Sort of. Let's put it this way: Oona and her flamin' molly
of an only child will never not have far more in common than either
of them are happy to admit. And frankly, I like it that way.

N is for—Normals (Badass)

Much like Hawkeye, Black Widow and Nick
Fury when compared with the rest of the Avengers, “normal” people
often tend to take a certain background stance when everybody else in
a given narrative has genuine superpowers. Except, of course, that
all three of the above-mentioned actually do have a shared
superpower: Being badass. In a funny way, part of the internal debate
driving Chess Pargeter at this point has a lot to do with the fact is
that while he started out thinking he was awesome/cursed for being so
special-snowflake different, it actually turns out he was part of a
bigger picture all along—that at least part of him, possibly the
most important part, comes with a semi-predictable set of rules
attached. Having always been a hex explains his ridiculous way with
guns, if not the inclinations that prompted him to take them up, in
the first place; does it automatically dismiss every other ingredient
of what makes him him?

Meanwhile, my favourite badass
normal—Ed Morrow—just keeps on keepin' on, even surrounded as he
is by magic-addicted once and future bosses, drunken arcanists,
various hexacological consorts, his demigod pal with benefits and the
not-exactly-girlfriend he thought was normal when they first hooked
up, but is now carving out a corner of the board for herself, using a
completely different set of powers. Luckily, he has good instincts,
stamina and a fair sense of humour to support him, so I'm pretty sure
he'll manage to come out of things all right.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

The great part about making a horror
movie, director Bernard Rose (Candyman, Paperhouse) used to
say, is that you can kill off your entire cast, if you want/need to.
To that observation I would add a paraphrasing of Stephen King's
explanation of The Ghost Trick, as used in the supernatural soap Dark
Shadows: Yes, but the problem is—especially when you're dealing
with magicians, in a universe already full of both resurrected gods
and simple human ghosts—killing people off doesn't always take. So
the lure is knowing that you can exploit at will the narrative
emotional outpouring which accompanies the “death” of any given
character, without ever actually having to permanently shift them off
the board at all. Do that too many times, however, and you end up
being Marvel (or DC); nobody believes the stakes anymore, because
you've bent them so many times in order to bring your
darlings/franchises literally back to life. Nothing matters.

I told myself many times that if I
pushed the Hexslinger series to where it should logically go, I
really would have to kill a lot of people. Which is why it didn't
surprise me when the characters I knew I knew in my gut were probably
going to survive did, but I must admit, it did surprise me how much
the other ones not doing so actually hurt. Which is good, I guess...

L is for—Love's A Curse

Or so Chess Pargeter's Ma always used
to say, and she'd certainly know. It continues to interest me how
much of my idea of epic love seems to have been inextricably
influenced by listening to way too many Joan Baez albums as a kid, in
that I just can't reconcile myself with the concept that a love big
enough to kill or die for is ever a good thing, exactly.
Instead, it strikes me as a sort of wound, a two-person trauma which
inevitably hurts as much as it heals. Within the context of the
Hexslinger series, for example, I don't think it's debatable that
Chess has learned a lot from loving Reverend Rook, and that the
people around him have benefited from that same sorrowful tuition in
self-knowledge. And once upon a time, Chess's automatic reply to that
observation would've been a simple: Oh yeah? Well, fuck 'em
all, anyhow...but the fact that he isn't quite as inclined to do
so anymore (or rather not as inclined to act on it, because he'd
probably still say it, if only to be a bitch) is another
consequence of the same scar tissue. Ash Rook has changed him,
irreparably, making him a different person. Yet in much the same way
Chess has already benefited from the damage he took in loving Rook,
by the beginning of A Tree of Bones, Rook—who still
justifies the worst of his betrayals by saying he only did what he
did in order to “save” Chess from future harm—has already begun
to accept that his baseline ideal of love may be exactly as hollow as
his hypocrite preacher's faith ever was...and that if he wants to
redeem himself at all, if not his choices, he has to give up on the
idea of getting any sort of return on his investments, to serve
without expectation—or even hope—of gain, like the “true”
Christian he's never really felt himself to be. Which really can't
help but get messy, as a strategy.

Friday, April 27, 2012

I think we can all probably agree that
by this point in the narrative, no matter her dreamlike seductiveness
earlier on, Dread Lady Ixchel has become very firmly a monster, both
morally and visibly. This mostly has to do with the degeneration of
her chosen vessel, poor Miss Adaluz, whose suicide and resurrection
Rook oversaw in A Book of Tongues. Now she's looking for a
replacement body, but just as Larry Cohen noted in his film Q: The
Winged Serpent, Mexica faith-based magic has one very particular
limitation—nine times out of ten, it requires a willing
sacrifice. And trying to make someone “love” you enough to lay
down their life “for” you so that you can possess their body
after it's vacant is sometimes a little bit harder than it seems.
Luckily for Ixchel—and unluckily, for everybody else—she always
has a fall-back position.

J is for—Johnson (Andrew)

Who was President in 1867, exactly?
Chances are, if I was actually American, this might not have proved
such a goddamn stumper. As it is, if I had a dollar for every time I
mistook Andrew Johnson (1986-1869) for Andrew Jackson (aka “Old
Hickory”, 1829-1837) while writing and editing all three books, I'd
have a nice little nest-egg. One way or the other, Johnson comes a
little more directly into the narrative in A Tree—I vaguely
discuss his failed impeachment, have him conferring with Allan
Pinkerton via ectoplasmic avatar, and note that his admission of
Nebraska to the Union makes him the sort of guy who might be okay
with signing off on a new state, in theory. Given the timing, he
seems like a President who'd understand that in a world where hexes
can suddenly cooperate, matters hexalogical would really have to be
put on the table from now on, along with whatever arcanistric
measures could be raised to deal with them. (I also make him a bit of
a racist, for which I apologize, especially if it wasn't true.)

Thursday, April 26, 2012

When I first got the idea which would
become the Hexslinger Series, I was deeply in love with Martin
Scorsese's epic Gangs of New York. I did scads of historical
research, wrote a bunch of fanfiction you can probably find pretty
easily (as usual, I was almost the only person doing so), and started
putting together a completely different book that I will probably
return to, though not immediately. But nothing caught fire. Maybe it
was the scope, or the fact that you need to be far more careful in
terms of metropolitan geography than you do when writing a Western,
because in the latter case it's an option to just claim the
interiors of Arizona and New Mexico are mainly empty space unless you
tell the audience different. By the time I got to A Rope of
Thorns, however, I had to come up with some new hexes, and my
mind defaulted to Gotham. Thus was born dapper pimp Three-Fingered
Hank Fennig, late of the Glorious Know-Nothing Order of Native
Americans, along with his three lovely Missuses, Clodagh Killeen,
Eulalia Parr and Roberta Schemerhorne. Fennig, being well-used to
gang dynamics, supports Rook and Ixchel overtly while studying them
for flaws he can press on if needed, especially her; his true
interest is in the city Ixchel sees mainly as a flabby meat
by-product of her quest to restore the Mexica Fourth World, not least
because it's the only place he and massively pregnant Clo could ever
raise their probably-hexacious baby without being afraid they'd be
tempted to suck it dry. And in A Tree of Bones, these
considerations only become stronger, making Fennig and company a
surprisingly integral part of the plot.

H is for—Hex City

Like I said before, storytelling is
alchemical; nothing stays the same, and really, nothing should. So
while I'm not entirely sure if I knew from the start that I was going
to shatter one of the key assumptions of the Hexslinger-'verse by the
end of A Book of Tongues—the idea that “mages don't
meddle” because there are simply no circumstances, ever,
under which they might be able to work together—when A Rope of
Thorns rolled around, I found myself in the unenviable position
of having to figure out how a place like New Aztectlan/Hex City would
actually function. Who would seek it out, and why; how would
it be constructed; what would be the division of labour; how would
the mechanics of the Ixchel-imposed Oath be enacted. I had had the
impression that there were occasionally circumstances under which
hexes would agree to work together, but that those were few and far
between because at any moment, either of those involved might turn on
the other. But once the Oath itself was sketched out—in A Rope—I
began to see the ways that it might be modified or twisted to fit a
bunch of different circumstances. Thus the “problem” of both Hex
City—ie, the fact that its inhabitants want it to survive more than
they want its founder to triumph—and how the Oath might be
translated out into the wider world of hexes who don't happen to be
New Aztectlites becomes front-and-centre in A Tree of Bones,
with hopefully interesting results.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

It
took me almost the whole of A Book of Tongues
to decide that I was, in fact, going to bring Tezcatlipoca (the
Smoking Mirror, Mexica Trickster god of magic) on board as Ixchel's
not-exactly-opposite number, but once I did, things fell into place
with surprising ease. One thing I've learned to trust about my
process is that just as things always change alchemically while
making their way from here to there, what we originally think are
mistakes are sometimes plot twists in disguise. So when I realized—as
a reviewer recently kindly pointed out—that I'd initially mistaken
the Mayan goddess Ixchel (goddess of the moon, of the rainbow, of
childbirth) for the Mayan goddess Ixtab (She of the Rope, Mother of
Hanged Men), what occurred to me as a way to “fix” this
assumption was the idea of Ixchel having “eaten” Ixtab (along
with a bunch of other Mexica and Mayan goddesses), consuming her
essence vampirically, the way living hexes do with other hexes. With
that in mind, it turns out that “The Enemy”—or T-Cat, as I call
him—is already acknowledged by Mexica mythology to be four gods in
one: Xipe Totec (god of corn, of new growth, Our Lord the Flayed
One), Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent or God Who Dies),
Tezcatlipoca (as she wrote) and Huitzilopochtli (god of royalty, of
lightning, of war)...and by the end of A Rope of Thorns,
we'd seen all these aspects represented except one. So Chess
Pargeter, having completed his Xipe Totec cycle with a self-sacrifice
so huge it brings an entire town back to life, enters A Tree of Bones
as a man divided: His soul is stuck downstairs in the Underworld,
while his body struts around being occupied by
Tezcatlipoca-as-Huitzilopochtli, blue skin, Red Weed underpants,
lightning-snake whip and all. So the Enemy becomes the real
enemy, one more wild card added to the deck, both on and off the
battlefield; untrustworthy by nature, but always interesting. Just
the way a Trickster should be.

F is
for—Faith

Like a lot of
people not raised with any sort of religion, I find Fundamentalist
Christianity both fascinating and slightly scary. But seeing how I'd
already had Nazarene preacher-turned-Sheriff Mesach Love rampaging
'cross the landscape as a secondary villain in A Rope, I felt
it was high time for someone of similar philosophical leanings to be
developed as a character who was complicated and human yet
essentially positive. This, then, is why Mesach's widow Sophronia
Love starts A Tree having already assumed the position of
Bewelcome township's unofficial Joan of Arc; by showing how her
compassion, sense of responsibility, and rectitude counterbalance the
ruthlessness of ostensible “good guy” Allan Pinkerton, we
retroactively get some idea not only what kind of man Love must once
have been and why the Bewelcomites followed them out here in the
first place, but why faith and devotion were such driving forces in
settling the West generally. In the Hexslinger-'verse, of course,
faith—a powerful, deliberate commitment to something “higher”—can
be used both to actively neutralize hexation or (if the faith itself
allows this, as with Grandma's Diné
traditions) support and enhance its effects; the parallels between
the commitment of true faith, and the commitment of the binding Hex
City Oath, are completely deliberate, eventually playing out for
Sophy in an intensely personal and shocking way...

Since
A Book of Tongues was frankly a
bit of a sausage party, in A Rope of Thorns, I
began by deliberately developing at least one awesome lady character,
only to watch others start spilling out of the woodwork by Act Three.
And while I genuinely tried to make sure there were Native characters
involved from the beginning of the story (more on this later), as
well as at least some other People of Colour here and there, by the
time Tree rolled
around, two things were obvious: A) A lot more of said PoCs had thus
far been represented as “monsters” than I felt comfortable with,
overall, and B) I was also starting to find the lack of straight-up
African-Americans in my own narrative disturbing, especially since it
was explicitly set post-Civil War. So one decision I made before even
starting the book was that if any portion of the U.S. Army was
assigned to support Allan Pinkerton's war against Hex City, it would
probably consist of one of those legendary Coloured Brigades like the
one showcased in Edward Zwick's film Glory.
This allowed me to bring in new characters such as the 13th Louisiana Regiment of Infantry (African Descent)'s
commander, Captain Washford—definitely a departure
from historical accuracy, I'm sad to say—and a soldier who becomes
friends with Ed Morrow, Private Carver. I'm also fairly proud of a
lady who calls herself Sal Followell, using that post-slavery
shorthand of taking your former owner's last name, who emerges as one
of the backbone mages on the Hex City Council. She's nobody's
“auntie”, and knows more about the cannibal mechanics of hexation
vs. hexation than some of her more idealistic comrades have ever
dreamt of, so she makes a damn good devil's advocate without actually
advocating for the Devil.

D is for—Diné

Like
I said, I really wanted to have Native/First Nations characters from
the get-go, difficult and potentially problematic as I knew that
would be. In A
Book of Tongues,
the main representative from this group was the DinéHataalli
known as “Grandma” or “Spinner”, a devotee of the Great
Spider Mother, the Weaver, the Changing Woman—sworn enemy of all
Anaye,
and of every hex who makes him- or herself a monster by walking the
Witchery Way. One of the reasons I love writing Grandma so much is
that I've tried throughout to make her as little like the Magical
Native Person stereotype as possible; she's a crusty old lady, blunt
and bruisingly practical, with about as little inherent respect for
Stupid White (People)/Bilagaana
as Gary Farmer's character Nobody from Jim Jarmusch's Acid Western
Dead Man.
This attitude gets her killed by the end of A
Book,
but being a hex, that's not the drawback it might be: She returns at
the end of A
Rope,
and enters A
Tree
as a grumpy ghost trapped inside a gigantic, haphazard golem made
from bone-dust. Like a lot of hexes, Grandma devoutly believes that
her way/tradition is the right one, and while her ideal of Balance
between natural and unnatural forces does indeed seem
smart—antithetical to Ixchel's blood-soaked craziness, at any
rate—part of her overall journey has always been towards the
realization that she does not have all
the answers, just because she has one or two. But then again, none of
the hexes, or even my characters, do; the final lesson is, I suppose,
that the best version of an “answer” can really only be assembled
by committee.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

It's official—May
15, 2012, is the release date for A Tree of Bones, the third
and final Hexslinger Series instalment. As our blood-soaked gay porno
black magic horse opera trilogy reaches its intense conclusion,
meanwhile, I'm going to be counting down the days with various
supplemental goodies, starting today with the beginning of a
Hexslinger Alphabet Meme: Two letters per day, one concept per
letter. Without further ado, then...

A is for—Arcanistry

As A Tree of Bones begins,
Columbia University Doctor of Sciences Joachim Asbury—by now known
colloquially as “Doc Hex”—is widely considered America's
foremost expert in the relatively new field of Experimental
Arcanistry. He's attained this position through the invention of
Asbury's Manifold, a device which (in A Book of Tongues) finally gave
non-hexacious humans the means to both identify unexpressed hexes and
measure the power-fields of expressed ones by tracking the flow of
“what the Celestials call ch'i” through the body. From
there, the Manifold's applications have only widened:
Latest-generation models can be used to deflect hexes' magic, channel
it, or even momentarily suppress it, while Asbury's battlefield
researches have created an entire sub-class of collared hexes who
wrangle their own kind under Pinkerton Detective Agency supervision.
While there's no doubt that this sort of black science may seem like
the only logical weapon of choice when arrayed against the wild
chaos-power of demigods like Ixchel Rainbow and her Enemy,
however—plus the scarily organized “smaller” mages of Hex City
itself—even Asbury has to admit that the technological learning
curve has accelerated under pressure far past the point where he can
predict it anymore, let alone control it. Can a full-bore magic vs.
anti-magic Second Civil War be far behind?

B is for—Blood

Blood, bright-hot and flowery, is the
fuel Dread Lady Ixchel's Machine runs on, the coinage that New World
she wants to “bring on” will be paid for in. What's becoming
clearer, however, is that the mostly-American hexes she and Reverend Rook
have gathered around themselves to help Make It So are far less
enchanted with the basic principle of self-sacrifice than the Mexica
and Mayan flocks who once supported Ixchel's pantheon ever were. (Hell, even the Chinese and Shoshone ones don't like it much, for that matter.) As
Rook notes, Americans—however hexacious in nature—are universally
raised to expect to be paid for what they do and to keep what they've
earned. And while they're perfectly willing to spill blood to get
what they want—both their own, or that of anybody stupid enough get
in their way—they also have very specific ideas about what
constitutes the best use of that blood, once shed. Ixchel expects her
hungers, being god-sized, to trump theirs; Rook thinks she may be
fooling herself, though he isn't about to say that out loud. Not yet,
anyhow.

Homepage of writer Gemma Files

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About Me

Award-winning horror author Gemma Files is also a film critic, teacher, screenwriter, Writer's Guild of Canada member, wife and mother. In 1999, her story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won an International Horror Guild award for Best Short Fiction. She sold five of her stories to erotic horror anthology TV series THE HUNGER, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott's Scott Free production company. She wrote the Series Two episodes "Bottle of Smoke" and "The Diarist" herself. Her first novel, A BOOK OF TONGUES, is available right now from ChiZine Publications. It will be followed by two sequels, A ROPE OF THORNS (2011) and A TREE OF BONES (2012). Gemma Files can be contacted at filesgemma@gmail.com